Just Kidding

"I thought I was doing it for them, but the one that got the most out of it was me."

“They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They give you all the faults they had
And add some new ones, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”

~ Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse (“High Windows” - 1971)

“My daughter, when I was in my 30s, went school at Stanford. I couldn't stand it. She was so far apart. And so I'd think of reasons to make trips out there, try to come up with a little business or something. I go out there with her. I get an old office downtown Palo Alto, Jean goes to class with her. I said, you know, I need to get some things going out here if I want to spend this kind of time. So I went over to Brentwood, about 20 or 30 miles from San Francisco, and I bought about 25 lots like I was going to build 25 houses, except I drilled four gas wells. And those four gas wells in 18 months paid me enough money for me to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Paying attention to my kids actually led to me getting involved into the passion of my life. And all along, what I was trying to do is hang out near my daughter.

Lot of things happened that you didn't have planned or don't have the strategy for. Now I'm not saying I've done anything right, but I made my mind up long time ago I was gonna work with my kids. They're involved in everything. They involved my leasing, oil and gas, real estate, and so when I got the Cowboys, I got it so that we could all work together. I thought I was doing it for them, but the one that got the most out of it was me.

I just know it's not gonna be this time, but you're gonna be sitting here sometime in the future, laying here sometime in the future, and this room is gonna be full of your business associates and the people you worked with all your life, and more than likely, your children and family are gonna be there because they're your children and your family, but you could have them there, because they're the people you spent your life with, you worked with, you fell down with, you got up with, not just Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's who you want to be with.

So when that time comes like this, it's a celebration of your life, and you're not wishing you got to spend a little more time seeing a few more suns come up. That's the trick. That's the trick because that's going to be your glory. I'm pretty proud of them Cowboys; I'm pretty proud of the stuff we've done in oil and gas. It pales in comparison to how proud I am to have lived my life working with my kids. You got a chance to do something about that. I hope you will.”

~ Jerry Jones (Owner of the Dallas Cowboys and legendary Texas entrepreneur and oilman) in a cameo appearance on “Landman” (S1E9 at 09:20) talking to Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) , the billionaire owner of M-TEX who is lying in a hospital bed after another heart attack. [See also David Senra’s outstanding Founders Podcast episode #379 ]

A little over two years ago I published a piece entitled

reproducing the list of twenty “rules of life” that guides Orthodox Jews in the ordering and execution of their daily lives and presented by Berel Solomon on his YouTube channel. Rule #18 is

# 18 Teach your children how to make a living and earn their keep. This is the primary duty of a father towards his children. If you do not, you are encouraging them to steal or be dependent on others.

This one piece of wisdom stuck with me more than any of the other nineteen and I have been chewing on its implications ever since. At the time our eldest was 23 years old and our youngest just 18. Our little brood was emerging from the sausage factory of modern education and beginning the wonderful and - from the parental perspective only - mildly terrifying task of making their way in the world. Gnawing in the background of my reflection was the question of whether I and my wife had done a good, fair or miserable job of preparing them for business of life, its hand raised urgently and demanding an answer. I had none that I could rely on.

Basic Training

My wife of 25 years and their mother is blessed with a ruthlessly practical streak and an intolerance bordering on pathological antipathy to procrastination and not attending to shit that could be done immediately, knowing in her infinite wisdom that jobs, tasks, phone calls, the small activities of daily life that can all be completed in less than five minutes have a tendency to metastasize exponentially into larger problems when not attended to in short order, indeed create lengthy tailbacks and traffic jams of Lake-District-on-a-bank-holiday-weekend proportions as all the downstream activities begin to get snarled up and put on interminable hold due to the non-attendance to shit that could and should be done NOW. I mention this because much as this was not a popular (mild understatement) regimen to pubescents of either sex (we have a brace of both), and at times led to Gaza levels of conflict and attestations of eternal hatred, it has prepared them more practically for a life in which getting shit done is well over half the battle in the quest for economic utility than my more cerebral support. David Allen, author of the famous and popular 1990s productivity guide points out that

”Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”

Or more pointedly, not starting tasks that need attending to when they need attending to. Navy Seals like to say that under pressure a soldier does not rise to their potential but sinks to the level of their habitual training. So in matters of GTD (or in my parlance GSD), frugality and the ability to stand in the face of conflict, their training at their mother’s boot camp has prepared them excellently for whatever life might throw at them.

However, as Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon series, points out in his excellent autobiographical “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”, Nietzsche’s comment that “‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’ sounds clever, but it’s a loser philosophy”. GTD is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in life, or to reframe rule #18, to earn a living AND be happy doing it. Finding work to do that aligns with your talents and that is useful to others is, I believe the primary objective: getting things done quickly and efficiently is a handy basic training but it doesn’t answer the question of whether you are moving in the right direction or even doing the right thing in the first place.

The Journey of The Father is Embedded in the Son (or Daughter)

Our children grew up in an entrepreneurial household — I have been running my own business since before the first of them arrived mewling and puking on the planet — so they have imbued a perspective that is conditioned by that - ups and downs, both financial and emotional, and the roller coaster that accompanies the vicissitudes of a life spent as the offspring of a professional opportunist, poet manqué and generalist.